


Tangerine Tree

by Ariasune



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Civil War, History, M/M, Murder, angsty, discussions of homosexuality in iberian culture, hatecrime, have you read lorca, oc!depiction of a historical figure, old fic, prose based on the work of lorca, repost, you should
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-08
Updated: 2014-06-08
Packaged: 2018-02-03 21:07:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1757045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariasune/pseuds/Ariasune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Federico del Sagrado Corazon de Jesus Garcia Lorca and his country, Spain; an examination of desire, civil war, how gold spits on people, and on the climbing of tangerine trees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tangerine Tree

**Author's Note:**

> One of my favourite playwrights of all time, who was actually referenced in Gesture, is Lorca. Lorca was a homosexual Spanish Poet who opposed societal laws in general. It's a lot more complicated than that, but essentially, he wrote stuff against the Catholic Church in Spain, as well as being a homosexual and anti-communist, and was eventually killed – allegedly, Lorca was shot repeatedly in the ass. Quite a nasty thing to happen to a brilliant man, who wrote some of the most passionate poetry I've laid eyes on.
> 
> Lorca struggled with loneliness, homosexuality, and suicidal tendencies all of his adult life, some of it spent in America, a place he was none too fond of. He lies buried in an unmarked and unknown grave alongside several of his countrymen, and the location of this grave has not been found.
> 
> Though, I ought to be kicked for calling him a playwright, for he constantly thought of himself as a poet. Either way, figured I'd give us a nice little ficlet involving Spain and Lorca.
> 
> I don't know much about the Spanish Civil War, and I didn't want to write a textbook about it either, so, this is historically quite weak. My main interest was the relationship between Lorca and Spain, and doing justice to the character of Lorca.
> 
> In warning, they're lovers in this, which is not something I planned when I started writing it, but it seemed to work best that way. And, I've not edited this either…

 

* * *

Act 3:

* * *

Antonio smiled.

It was all he could do, after-all; the sun beat down the long fields of Granada, and stole into the upper boughs of the tangerine tree. The sun was constant; throwing its heat around like a dead weight. So, Antonio smiled, and his mouth crinkled like good linen, and his skin shone like gold in the light. The light  _was_  gold, pressing down on him, with its metallic glow and sweet, amber heat – but sometimes gold spits.

And down Antonio's cheeks ran two white-gold rivers of tears, but he did not stop smiling.

Maybe one day, somebody would scale the tangerine tree, and pull off a single piece of fruit, scattering orange blossom each way. Maybe one day, Antonio would.

He'd press it into his open-mouth, and let the juices drip down his chin and onto his front. He'd taste it, sweet and freeing on his tongue. The shattered fruit sticking between his gums, cloying to his palette. And with every smile and laugh he'd make, he'd spit the golden juice out.

Maybe one day, he'd build a statue for one of the greatest poets of his nation, and they'd write his name on a wall, and give him the burial he deserved. Maybe one day, Antonio would be able to talk about his mercurial mind under the grips of the civil war. Maybe one day, he'd learn not to let the storms brew in every room of his house, and not let the silence suffocate them all, the sun's heat seeping into the walls and throwing tension and anger into every heart.

Antonio could feel the hot wash of tears on his face, but more than that he could feel the smile on his face, and raised his hands indelicately, and found he could not scrape the smile away, no matter how hard he tried. The smile stared out at the world, defiantly like sunlight that creeps into any corner and sees everything. Like his tears, he dropped to his knees in a pitter-patter, picking up the crumpled white flowers from the floor. Then he clutched and dug at the earth with his nails, thickly.

He could feel the bodies tangled and curled up under his earth; he could feel the man; lying there under his soil; sleeping. And thrashing fingertips scrambled and clung at the loam, the pale orange blossom stuck between the mud and fingers, as he dug and dug and cried, still unable to peel the smile away from his face. His skin did not peel in the sunlight, only turned to gold (and how it spat at him). Antonio would claw the dirt away, with his nails, and draw him shaking from the earth, fling him against a wall, scream and beg, and maybe he would wake up. Antonio would guard this grave, so that not one of his murderers, or their children, or children's children, or any of them could ever find a way to be buried here. Nobody would find him here.

No monster would ever be buried next to him, like a lover in his bed.

Antonio's heart was breaking; he knew it. That was what this was, and he fumbled, pressing his fingers, all muddied and swelled with wedding blossoms, to his heart, and rubbed his scorching, overheated golden skin. Soothed the skin in the familiar movement, and shakily whispered; "Dios te salve, María,"

His heart was breaking, still breaking. Why couldn't it just be broken? Surely, there would come a point where he was left in pieces. The adjective he could survive; the verb he could not.

"Llena eres de gracia,"

Gracia.

But Garcia-

Oh wretched, wretched he, and Antonio felt his tears stop, because he was too dry and hot and empty to produce anymore, and wringing his hands helplessly on his chest, he dropped the crunched, crinkled, skeletons of the flowers to the ground.

Maybe one day, somebody would find him beneath the tangerine tree, amongst the dying blossoms, and tangled roots, against two of his countryfolk in that last sleep.

* * *

Act 1:

* * *

"Lorca," Antonio was corrected heavily, and he wrung his face in a disapproving smile.

"Garcia," Antonio repeated. "Is the custom."

"And my father's name is not mine," Federico del Sagrado Corazon de Jesus Garcia Lorca, as he was most unarguably known, grinned, adjusting his collar. "I prefer to go by Lorca."

"Your mother's name is also not yours." Antonio replied, crossing his arms over his chest.

"She needs the respect a lot more than my father did." Lorca smiled just as much as Antonio, it seemed, and with a strange frankness, he leaned forward, scanning Antonio's face. "Your eyes are green; does that mean there is hope in Spain yet?" Antonio's smile flailed for a few seconds, before quirking in surprise. "It has been more than ten years, and you are no older."

"Immortality does not necessarily imply any link with Spain." Antonio managed stiffly, and Lorca laughed leaving Antonio's heart pounding, so loud it was like a rush in his ears, a flush of blood in his face. Lorca inhaled, deeply, laughing again, and then biting it off with a gentle smile.

"You smell like oranges, and trees, and the soil. But the sweat of the cities too. The dust of the vineyards. The country," Lorca shut his eyes, twisting his head about like a cat hoping to be scratched behind the ears. "And you sound like every voice I have ever loved; you're Spain, aren't you?"

Antonio tipped his head, "And?"

"I have friends who have met you as well – we have compared notes." Lorca admitted. "Are there others like you?"

"Some." Antonio admitted; how many times had he met this man and not noticed? How many of his friends had he met?

"Have you come to see my play?" Lorca wandered over to a nearby fruitbowl, precariously placed in the sea of guests. The atmosphere was heavy-lidded, but it felt as though Antonio had only just seen it. It came back in a smoky, twirling mess of a crowd, and cocktails. Lorca picked up a single orange, and span it through his fingers, before looking back at Antonio with the brown eyes of the deep earth, that almost all the Spanish have.

"Yes, the butterfly's evil spell," Antonio, bidden by something, and unresisting towards it, followed Lorca like a shadow, and stopped in front of him. Slowly, he swallowed, as though the next moment was important. Lorca let the orange sit in his fingers, for a few moments, and then Antonio turned to the open air; the pressure lifted. Perhaps the moment was not so important. "I had heard about it."

"What had you heard?" Antonio jerked back to look at Lorca's bitter face, as he hooked a thumb into the orange's skin and yanked a chunk away, before sliding his fingers under it and stripping the orange's skin; leaving it naked and helpless as chunks of peel came away. "That it is being laughed off the stage?" They met eyes, and Antonio shivered – something settling in his stomach, uncomfortably like guilt. "That was cruel, Spain."

No, it's not guilt, and Antonio turned his body properly to face the other way, the hiss-pop of his veins lightning, searing hot.

Antonio wrapped his hands in Lorca's hands, plucking the orange from his hands, and shelling it himself, flecking the juice and pith from Lorca's fingers. He cracked the fruit apart, and pressed a single segment to Lorca's mouth. Waiting for the man to open his mouth, and eat it.

Sighing, Lorca obliged, pressing his lips for the slightest second to Antonio's fingertips. "Hello." Lorca supplied, and Antonio smiled shyly, until Lorca smiled back again, the shape and curve of his lips pressing into Antonio's bones.

* * *

The rush is tired, languid, and Antonio eyed the sky suspiciously, the plump, but not-yet full moon stretched across it. He turned to examine the shape and curve of Lorca's arms, splayed near his head. There are many reasons why nations will take human names, and, Antonio admits, this might be one of them. Rolling, and leaning over in the shallow light, Antonio pressed a single kiss to the crook of Lorca's elbow.

There is a laugh, and then a single, long hand that carded through his hair, "Will Spain remember me, Antonio?" He murmured into the thick air, voice still amused and thoughtless. Careless, as though nothing said will hurt him. "Or, like the buttefly's spell, am I a once-off?"

"I think," Antonio began, his voice sticking all through his chest, and up his neck, out his mouth, like he had swallowed and coated his insides with honey. As he spoke, the golden syrup tumbled out, spitting on the moment. "If you make a habit of falling in love with the wrong species, you will be laughed off the stage."

"This isn't a bad habit." Lorca corrected, but his voice laughed in all the wrong places, and when Antonio looked down at his face, framed with damp, sweaty hair, and looking as though he suddenly realized he cared about something, Lorca looked like he should have been crying and not smiling.

"Cruel," Lorca repeated, hands stuffed tightly through Antonio's hair.

* * *

Lorca had published a book of poems, and like the surge of the sea, like a mule butting him with its head, Antonio felt dragged, foot by foot, inch by inch, towards the poet. Antonio had found himself crashing into Lorca, and had to go, his entire body stained with blood and desire from head to toe.

He had run.

Only to run again into him soon after. Everything conspired against Antonio, including his own will. So, cruelly, he had surrendered. It would mean nothing if Lorca did not offer himself like a woman, and none would dare despise Antonio; none would even know, if Antonio, maybe-

Gripped his own ankles in the darkness, and whined, waiting. It would mean nothing, and would not be so cruel.

And Lorca found him, in the scraping, tapering darkness. The moon shut out by an old curtain flung over the window by the edges of its thick fabric, and cords. Antonio found him back, their mouths broken between them, as if bitten off by either lust, or love, or the sheer heat of the walls, reverberating around the room. Somewhere along the way, Antonio wondered if it had really meant nothing.

And when the morning found them twisted in the sheets, like slippery eels, intertwined like one long, sinuous body, safely destroyed by the forceful glint of the sunlight.

The sun who crawled between them on the bed, and watched Antonio until his eyes opened, and he smiled miserably, rolled over, gathered his things and when Lorca stirred in the crisp geography, topography, of the sheets, Antonio only smiled grimly in the sleepy poet's direction. Left; as though nothing had happened.

* * *

The cruelty spread between them over the years, in moments, some tender, and some-

Antonio had never allowed Lorca to spread his legs to him, for the sake of some thought of desire, and sooner or later, Lorca realized this, and lost his appreciation for when Antonio's appetite found them. They drifted apart, and Antonio met others lovers of Lorca's – not too many, to his infinite gladness – and then they would drift together again, and Lorca would murmur in a humming voice into Antonio's navel:

"One woman, for one man," Lorca gazed at Antonio. "Paired away; that is the way of things?"

"You are not a woman," Antonio kicked out at Lorca, who retreated to the far side of the bed tiredly. He didn't want Lorca's fidelity, and he didn't want Lorca opened for him like a woman, like the first night; what Antonio wanted was for Lorca to be a woman, so that he could desire the way he seemed to insist upon without fear. One woman, for one man; that was the way of things.

The two kept their sentries on either side of the bed for the whole night, but in the morning, Lorca pressed his mouth to Antonio's and told him in a quiet whisper that his eyes were green and that was beautiful; "Green, how I want you green. Green wind, green branches." He pressed the words against Antonio's mouth, and with a shrug, stood up again to leave.

Over his shoulder, he told Antonio that you cannot cut desire off at the head, and Antonio spent the rest of his day wondering what Lorca had meant.

* * *

Sometimes, after much writing left Lorca spent, he sought Antonio out: he always knew how to, the right streets to wander down, where to follow his feet, until he ended up pressed against Antonio. Sometimes, after fallings out with close friends (Antonio had held a weeping Lorca more times than he cared to count; but always the smile returned) and sometimes, after hard words with his brother. Despite Antonio's desperation to prove that nothing had happened whatsoever, Lorca himself was unraveling before the world.

In one eye, he was an outspoken writer, and in the other, he wore a green carnation in his pocket, marking him out for what he was. Antonio hated that Lorca so selfishly put himself into danger, but there was nothing he could do, but watch.

Melancholic, Lorca reached out brushing Antonio's face, drawing it with his fingers, and murmuring, talking as he always did, and massaging the air with his voice, until the room was thick and ripe for lovemaking; Antonio would never dare call it that, but when he pressed his lips to Lorca's shut eyes, and Lorca nibbled his wrists, and they laughed a sound all through all their mutual bones, there was love, and yes, it was being made and built in every second.

"I truly love my country, do I not?" Lorca snarled bitterly, one day, his familiar lullaby distorted.

"You're displeased."

"You refuse me self-expression." Lorca spat at Antonio angrily, his hand coming up between them, and cattily, Antonio sighed, stretched himself thinly out across their bed. "You refuse to bed me like we are equals; yet I love you," Lorca's voice dipped and bowed under his rage. "The Spanish Heat that suffocates my heart; the Spanish Sun that makes me sweat; The Spanish Moon that witnesses when Spain itself will not deign to come into me."

"Your voice is angry with me," Antonio purred methodically from the side. "But your words are not. Lorca, which is it?" Antonio propped himself on his elbows, and looked at Lorca curiously.

"Actually, the words were angry too." Lorca murmured, and returned to the strewn papers he had left littered on their bed; where they pretended nothing had happened, or was meant, but in actuality, patriotism itself was acted out in sultry, heated, tempestuous ways.

And gentle ones, as Antonio rolled over, and ran the back of his hand across Lorca's cheek, knuckles to jaw, as if punching through honey-light.

"Why do you let your passions wound you so, Lorca?" Antonio murmured. "Isn't it enough for you to have sunlight, one moon, four walls, tangerine trees, flamenco, and-"

"One woman and one man; paired together." Lorca cut over. "I am your dog, will you not bite me a little to show me my place?"

Antonio snorted angrily, "I suppose sex cannot be told from bite marks," And he leaned over Lorca's neck and bit at the junction of shoulder and neck, but Lorca scrambled back. "Didn't you say you wanted that?" Antonio chased Lorca back over the bed, until Lorca toppled off it and Antonio peered over the edge and down at Lorca.

"I'm to be married." Antonio paused, then nodded.

"It is right for you to be married Lorca." Antonio offered his hand out to Lorca. "One woman and one man, and," Antonio peered at his own hands, suddenly interested, falsely, in the texture of his own skin. Resolutely staring. "Sometimes one nation that cannot forget a great poet."

"I am your woman." Lorca stated, and Antonio pulled his hand back.

"You are no woman." Antonio growled. "I've not been inside you."

"No, not since the first, anyway," Lorca pointed out petulantly, and then strode on, insistent. "But I am still your woman; you know it."

Antonio shot across the bed, holding Lorca to the floor with a nation's strength and raked his hand from Lorca's collarbone to between his legs. "You don't feel like a woman." He stated, eyes like hot coals.

"How would you possibly know what I feel?" Lorca asked in incredulous disgust, and shoved Antonio off him, standing up straight, and gathering his clothes, dignity itself as he dressed and left Antonio – more than that, left the very country itself. Perhaps it was for the best.

* * *

Act 2:

* * *

"I met a monolith of a man in New York, who was always fighting the heavens over him; trying to fly, kidnap the moon, and scrape at the sky." Lorca murmured. "He called himself Alfred Jones and yelled at me for insulting his cocktails."

Antonio stroked Lorca's shoulders speculatively, and rubbed at his temples again.

"You're not tired of my voice, are you, Antonio?"

"I've missed you."

"I slept with him."

Antonio's stroking fingers clamped down on Lorca's shoulders. "You did not!"

"I did not," Lorca laughed, the sound familiar and beautiful in the air. "He was America's kind of you, wasn't he?" Another gorgeous dance of voice. "Otherwise, you wouldn't have reacted so badly."

"I didn't miss you, actually." Antonio defended, biting his lip and still rubbing his forehead.

"Things are getting worse here, aren't they Antonio?"

Antonio is wordless, as always. But he doesn't need to speak, merely hunch over, grimacing in pain, as an old lover turned round and reached up to kiss his jawline as if love could save anybody. But love has never been enough to save anyone.

* * *

Antonio woke to being wrapped up in Lorca's grip, and the nausea rocked him like a badly-moored boat. Struggling, and fussing in his arms, Lorca released him, and rolled up, rubbing his eyes tiredly. "A'nto'yo?" Lorca slurred, as Antonio bolted out of his arms for the bathroom. Slipping behind him, Lorca watched, waiting, and Antonio waited, staring at the toilet bowl, and gripping the edges in his white fingers.

Nothing came up.

Antonio weakly smiled, laughed – more like a sudden exhalation, in a puff of noise – and ducked his head, flushed and guilt settled uncomfortably on his diaphragm. He hiccoughed up another excuse for a laugh, and Lorca rubbed his shoulders.

"Worse?"

"Better." Antonio tried, but it didn't really work.

* * *

"You're growing old, Lorca." Antonio observed, pulling at a strand of grey in Lorca's hair; his face was drawn and tired. He spent so much time not knowing where or what he'd be doing last, sometimes waking in a pool of blood, and sometimes encircled in Lorca's arms, and sometimes exactly where he should be, but not very often. Disorienting was one word for it – frightening was another. To not know who you were, or what you believed in.

Sometimes when he looked at Lorca he felt as though he was drinking in his blood – and sometimes this was good, and sometimes this was bad. Worse still, Antonio couldn't tell which way round it was meant to go. Sometimes he wanted to bathe his hands in Lorca's blood, and sometimes he desperately wanted to take Lorca beneath him, and so mostly, he just wanted to be alone.

"You are as young as ever, Antonio." Lorca replied. "It's very cruel and rude of you; letting me grow old without the grace to not rub it in my face."

"I can-"

"Don't." Lorca dropped his pen and seized Antonio's hand where it had begun withdrawing from his hair. "Please don't." He composed himself, and tried to fight his face from falling wide open. "Antonio, I wish to leave this world the way I entered it-"

"Screaming, and covered in the blood of the person who loved you most?" Antonio arched an eyebrow, and smiled like a wildcat. The smile was so real, that Lorca could not pick where humour and ill-humour began and ended. But then, Antonio was so unpredictable these days.

"No, wise-ass," Lorca chuckled himself, defusing the moment as an expert defuses a bomb. The simple, crude insult letting the time past it easily, and flecked the heat down. "Unconcerned. Both about birth and death."

Antonio glowered at Lorca. "With the person you love the most worrying for you each moment, I see."

"You mean yourself?" Lorca mournfully smiled at Antonio. "Spain does not love Lorca." And maybe that's true, and false at the same time (which is unfailingly, the wrong time) because Antonio lets it pass; because if you have to ask.

* * *

Antonio forced Lorca out of the bed with a shove, and a push, and a wild snarl; "Out!" He was all but screaming by now. Lorca tumbled onto the floor, hands splayed to catch himself, and eyes blown wide in surprise as he looked up at Antonio.

Antonio shuddered, scratching at his temples, and curled his face into the sheets, and Lorca's expression faded to a torturous recognition.

Gingerly standing up, Lorca hovered between Antonio and where he'd fallen, chest heaving as he tried to contain himself, and Antonio scrawled his nails across his face, and rubbed his face in the familiar cross of María, humming and whispering and whimpering beneath his breath;

Eventually Lorca, almost inhuman in his movements, sat down, tucked his knees up and reaching out for a piece of paper and stray pen, kept his eyes on Antonio. Single-minded, and almost coldly, Lorca leaned the paper on his knees and began to write.

And Antonio cried out, the rough hiss of his prayers pattering on the air.

"Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia,"

And Lorca cried out, in the rough lines of prose, stomping and marching about the page.

* * *

Lorca fingered the leaves of paper, heavy and swollen with emotion, they weighed in his hands more than the weight of an infant. The words, as always, were his honest, tactless, cruel children. How lonely he was, how apart, and disparate, as though his skin would fly off into the night on weighty wings of feeling.

On the bed in the neighbouring room, Spain – tangerine trees, plump moons, and the sun throwing stifling heat every which way and under – Spain, shuddered and shook, hating him, and loving him in equal turn. Like the changing of the guard, Antonio suddenly moaned out and Lorca's head snapped up.

Closing his eyes, he listened to the length of the little noise, the little bite of it, like a kiss smashed on his skin, and a hateful twist of the arm. The pained croon climbed the air, and nestled in Lorca's ears, and he twisted his head like a cat trying to wriggle away from an over-eager childish hand.

How the loneliness sat on upon his back, like sunlight on the long Granada fields, beating the wheat with its tendrils.

His lover moaned in pain in the room just over, and he both could not and would not go to him. These sorts of things were not worth living for.

* * *

The door slid open with a numb mumble, and Antonio stood there framed in the tight afternoon glow. The sun through his hair, copper and gold – but sometimes gold spits, and Lorca paused in the constant reshuffling of his notes; he had been about to leave. They locked eyes; Antonio knew it.

With the changing of the guards, and the impossible sense of a downward spiral (a sycamore seed hurtling for the ground, an overheated horse stamping and steaming in the barn, the rush and desperation for both life and death) Antonio strode towards Lorca, and pinned him with a sharp-tongued kiss. Lorca slid under Antonio's arms, too old by far for passion, his emotions barren, dark and demanding like the shape of the ceiling above him.

Strewn over him, like heaven, and the watchful, curious cat's eye of the moon. Round, full, and dilated like mist and fog in the air with its searching, bloody light. Caught on the sight of Antonio's bare hip, and the view of Lorca's mouth open and parted, flushed, bruised lips clasping roughly at the air.

Antonio bit Lorca's shoulder, the moonlight smoothing the short hairs along his skin with her crooning fingers, and bit harder. Bit until Lorca's shoulder was red and angrily welted.

Lorca moaned; shuddering; loneliness, pain and dragging desire dancing, flying, running off into the night, exposed.

He moaned twice.

Antonio pressed Lorca firmly into the mattress, and dragged his teeth and lips away from Lorca's shoulder, the sticky lines of saliva clinging between them, and fastened himself on Lorca's lips again. The familiar taste of his mouth, the water and the spice, and Antonio sobbed brokenly into his lover's lips, drowning.

And Lorca whispered, voice tight and tense with what was unmistakably love: "To see you naked is to recall the earth." And his hands traced down Antonio's torso, down his ribs, and little nails dug against his stomach. They caught the air, again, and let it – the startled moonlight, and dense, crowded, thickened air of the room – paint and sheathe them in sweat.

It meant everything.

* * *

Act 3:

* * *

The rage flowered in Antonio, as blood buds in water, and flares out filmily in red.

He stalked his own soil, body taunt like a wildcat, and teeth bared for justice – whatever that entailed – and the familiar pain in his chest was mollified by the sharp rubs (vertical and horizontal, lateral and repeat) he placed alongside his chest. The crucifix, and writhing muscle shaped like stigmata.

Spain – not Antonio – Spain, in all his elemental, inhuman glory graced the land, and flesh of himself with a thumbing of blood and fury that seeped out of the walls, ran out with the pressured heat, and like the sunlight snapped across people. Slapping their faces, and twisting their hair.

And when he came to, his teeth glittered in a feline smile, edgy and pointy, and sharp in all the wrong places.

* * *

Antonio carefully scooped the dirt away from the hillside, pulling loose the thistles and knots of grass, exposing the three bodies; the pallor of earth-frozen flesh. He bent his head over the familiar curve of the face, and felt no tears run down his dry face, and pity help him (for prayers did not) Antonio was still smiling.

He pressed the flat of his hands on Lorca's – no, it wasn't Lorca, because Lorca was a flash of composed words – the husk that Lorca had shaken off in the violence of gunshots, the shed skin, and tightened his grip in Lorca's hair. The sun slid down the back of his neck, and in penance, sweat coiled down his collar. Not tears, but dull, hot sweat.

* * *

Antonio brought the other two men with the one that matters; because all his people matters; because they were his dead.

Unbidden, he remembered;  _In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world_.

Shouldering the men, with his thin and frail post-civil-war, nation strength, Antonio felt the burning tears slip, slide and ski down his cheeks – slow at first, and then swift. If only that were true, it's not true, if only it were true.

* * *

He held his hair back from his face, labouring under the thickened shade of the tangerine tree. Exhausted, he leant into his hands, letting the dust settle in the air. Slick across his face, settle on his cheek bones. Rusty, like copper on his golden skin and glittering sweat, caking his long face. He rubbed the back of his hand, and looked up at the barren, toddling tree.

The grave was not unmarked; the tangerine tree stood sentry, in cold, fruitless guard over Lorca.

Antonio smiled, the curve of his lips sharp and sad on his face.

One man, and one woman paired together was not always the way of things. Sometimes it was one man, and sometimes it was one nation, and sometimes Antonio was both, and maybe he couldn't forget.

* * *

The seasons fled by, and the years stuck to the bark of the tree, and it flowered and fruited in equal turn, and Antonio, as usual paid his respects to it: sobbing beneath its boughs, in the dust and dirt and loam and withering flowers. Lorca was but an armful, fistful, tightened grip of fading flowers in his arms.

He smiled, because no matter how hard he rubbed at his chest, and how deeply he murmured to the virgin mother, the dank heat of the sun continued to stretch itself over his body. So, he smiled, and sobbed, and came away like gold sweat – but sometimes gold spits.

Maybe he'd climb that tree, and maybe he'd show this place for what it was, and maybe he'd come to terms with everything the divide (great, and snaking scar across his tan back; like a wrinkled snake in his skin. Scarring,) had meant. Maybe he would turn over the matter in his head and recognize that it had meant a lot more than he had ever wanted. He was intelligent enough to know that  _his heart was breaking and simply would_ _ **not**_ _stop._

* * *

Act 1:

* * *

Lorca bit into the orange between Antonio's fingers, and smiled with the coy tact of a cat stretching in the sun. Gently, he pulled away. "Once," Lorca began, and Antonio found himself captivated, suddenly pushing forward to lay his body against Lorca's in the smoky, coiling, heavy-lidded crowd, his own green eyes hopeful and wide. "There was a dry, desert of a land and in that land, a young girl lived,"

Antonio heaved a breath, pressing his lips into the curve of Lorca's neck, against his ear, and the bird-thrum of a pulse travelled up Lorca's taunt neck. Burring through Antonio's skin, oh this was not guilt.

"Each morning she rose at dawn and made the bread, and in the evening she sewed the socks; four walls, and one sun to heat the land, and one girl in the desert," Lorca whispered. "But one day, the ground split like broken fruit rinds, and a tree snaked out of the earth, writhing and snatching at the air," Antonio kissed along Lorca's cheek; Antonio's breath hitching into razor-sharp, but tiny gasps. "Oh it  _coiled_ ," Lorca's voice rattled out of his chest. "Upwards, and the roots thickened in the ground like heavy lashes on a grown man's eyelids. And the good, lonely girl scaled the tree, bare feet to the branches," Antonio licked a stripe up Lorca's neck, teeth grazing, barely, barely. "On the bark, scraping her palms, she plucked a single tangerine from the tree and shook loose the blossoms. She bit the orange, and its juices dribbled down her chin, and welled up in her mouth, as though she drank in the blood of the tree, spat the yellow-amber colour of honey and gold."

Antonio sighed, hands fisted in Lorca's shirt, against the hitch-hitch press of the crowd.

"And in the dry, empty, meaningless desert, a taste of gold can swallow up a lonely girl like that." Lorca suddenly gasped, his breath loose in his throat. "Oh."

The two pressed their heats into each other; and Antonio felt the briefest touch of Lorca's fingers and the feeling of a segment of tangerine being pushed against his searching lips. He parted them, and bit so gently into the fruit, and felt the poet inhale.

Felt his foundations shake.

* * *

_Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia,_

_el Señor es contigo._

_Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres,_

_y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre, Jesús._

_Santa María, Madre de Dios,_

_ruega por nosotros, pecadores,_

_ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte._

 


End file.
